Mars 2020 Mission Overview

The Mars 2020 mission will seek the signs of ancient life on Mars and will identify, prepare, document, and cache a set of samples for possible return to Earth by a follow-on mission. Mars 2020 and its Perseverance rover thus link and further two long-held goals in planetary science: a deep search for evidence of life in a habitable extraterrestrial environment, and the return of martian samples to Earth for analysis in terrestrial laboratories. The Mars 2020 spacecraft is based on the design of the highly successful Mars Science Laboratory and its Curiosity rover, but outfitted with a sophisticated suite of new science instruments. Ground-penetrating radar will illuminate geologic structures in the shallow subsurface, while a multi-faceted weather station will document martian environmental conditions. Several instruments can be used individually or in tandem to map the color, texture, chemistry, and mineralogy of rocks and regolith at the meter scale and at the submillimeter scale. The science instruments will be used to interpret the geology of the landing site, to identify habitable paleoenvironments, to seek ancient textural, elemental, mineralogical and organic biosignatures, and to locate and characterize the most promising samples for Earth return. Once selected, ∼35 samples of rock and regolith weighing about 15 grams each will be drilled directly into ultraclean and sterile sample tubes. Perseverance will also collect blank sample tubes to monitor the evolving rover contamination environment. In addition to its scientific instruments, Perseverance hosts technology demonstrations designed to facilitate future Mars exploration. These include a device to generate oxygen gas by electrolytic decomposition of atmospheric carbon dioxide, and a small helicopter to assess performance of a rotorcraft in the thin martian atmosphere. Mars 2020 entry, descent, and landing (EDL) will use the same approach that successfully delivered Curiosity to the martian surface, but with several new features that enable the spacecraft to land at previously inaccessible landing sites. A suite of cameras and a microphone will for the first time capture the sights and sounds of EDL. Mars 2020’s landing site was chosen to maximize scientific return of the mission for astrobiology and sample return. Several billion years ago Jezero crater held a 40 km diameter, few hundred-meter-deep lake, with both an inflow and an outflow channel. A prominent delta, fine-grained lacustrine se